Return To Pangaea

by Dish Staff

Morgan Meis meditates on the symbolic meaning of the Panama Canal, which officially opened 100 years ago this month:

[F]or all this talk of progress and accumulated knowledge of the continents and seas, there is also something prehistoric about the desire to bring all the continents closer together. That’s because they were all together once. … On Pangaea, what we now know as Africa was nestled in the crook between North and South America, almost like a baby. Eurasia was connected to the top of North America. Then, over millions of years, the land mass began to break up, due to motion of the tectonic plates. The continents separated from one another. The oceans filled up the spaces in between. What was one, split into many.

Unknowingly, unconsciously, the engineers of the Panama Canal were acting as agents of the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea. Bring it all back together. Shorten the distances. Heal the wounds, maybe, from the terrible splitting that tore the world out of its oneness hundreds of millions of years ago. That is how it can seem, anyway, when you take the long view, when you look at it from a geological perspective. It is like an old dream of continental unity that we never knew we had. It is like the crust beneath the earth found a way to influence the minds of the men who crawl upon the surface. “Bring us back together.” You can hear it whispered from the cracks and crevices and fault lines that go down into the dark places beneath.

(Image of the Panama Canal as seen from space via Wikimedia Commons)